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    The Prodigy Puzzle - by Ann Hulbert

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The Stanford-Binet I.Q. test reached middle age along with the Termites, looking disappointingly staid itself. At least it did from the vantage of those increasingly convinced that youthful giftedness could not be reduced to a fixed and innate general intellectual ability or potential. In postwar America, the terms "gifted" and "talented" crowded out "genius," which sounded suspiciously elitist, and a quest was under way for a wider, democratic conception of human excellence. Psychologists pushed toward a more multifaceted understanding of giftedness, turning their attention to "divergent thinking" and creative capacities - fluency, originality, flexibility - as well as to a wider range of less distinctively intellectual abilities, like "task commitment." It was time, too, to take a more interactive, social view of the emergence and growth of talent, whose very existence in childhood, after all, depended on adult recognition. Youthful giftedness could not be fully appreciated, or cultivated, without viewing it as a social construct, a capacity that flourishes thanks to a confluence of forces: a domain of knowledge with clearly demarcated rules a child can master, adult models and mentors ready to assist and a receptive cultural context. All of these factors help explain why highly structured, permanently valued fields like music and math prove especially hospitable to prodigies. It's also why precocious mental calculators and map makers, for example, were once a sought-after variety of prodigy and no longer are.

Some 50 years after Terman, giftedness was a social construct in flux and in the spotlight. The first federal definition of "children capable of high performance," announced in the Office of Education's Marland Report of 1972, which led to legislation on education for the gifted, was a symptomatic catch-all. The formulation covered students "with demonstrated achievement and/or ability in any of the following areas, singly or in combination: general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual- or performing-arts aptitude, psychomotor ability." The lineup still led off with what Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College and the author of "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities" (1996), describes as "the smooth and even image of the globally gifted child." Yet narrower talents - and perhaps quirkier and more uneven ones - now received independent billing, for the old faith had been shaken that I.Q. and creativity were so closely correlated after all. The problem was, there were no good tools for tracking skills like "creative or productive thinking," and in any case, what could that really mean in childhood, a period dedicated to mastering, not generating, knowledge? Looking back to the 1980's, David Henry Feldman, who teaches child development at Tufts University and is the author, with Lynn T. Goldsmith, of "Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential" (1986), recalls a sense of frustration with psychometricians and with "creativity as measured by creativity tests, as in how many ways can you use or describe a brick" - but also a sense of ferment. He was busy examining the uncanny extremes that Terman's study had skirted - Feldman's book probes six specialized prodigies and their hothouselike homes - and he found himself sharing ideas with an eclectic array of psychologists tackling the development of creativity from different angles. Among them were Howard Gardner, who was soon to begin work on his theory of "multiple intelligences," and Howard Gruber and Dean Keith Simonton, both busy looking at the history of creative eminence.

But the impulse to "recharge" the prodigy notion with some of its "original power and mystery," as Feldman put it in his book, failed to gather scientific momentum, he now ruefully admits. (He awaits further brain research.) In the meantime, a less global assessment method than the I.Q. exam had proved itself ideal for identifying the most familiar item on that Marland Report list of special capacities, "specific academic aptitude." There is nothing like a ready tool, and a numerical measure, to cut a phenomenon down to more accessible - and usable - size in America.

The test was the SAT, which Julian Stanley, who established Johns Hopkins as a center of gifted education and research, went ahead and administered in 1969 to an 8th-grade math whiz he had heard was not only excelling in a summer computer course at Hopkins but also helping graduate students. Joe aced the math portion. It emerged that among children under 13 who scored in the very highest percentiles on grade-level standardized tests, there were some who could match or outperform the average high-school senior SAT-taker, particularly on the math section, but also on the verbal section and sometimes on both. The SAT could thus be used as a device for winnowing the top and tiptop performers in specific areas very early. With the help of colleagues, Stanley inaugurated the Johns Hopkins talent search and began gathering subjects for the second-most-famous longitudinal gifted study: the continuing Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which includes a superselect cohort of students who scored 700 or above on the math or the verbal section before turning 13 (a feat performed by 1 in 10,000 children, those the Davidsons and others label "profoundly gifted"). Intervention was Stanley's real goal, and acceleration - not mere enrichment - became his mission, which meant packing the earliest SMPY phenoms off to college very young. Soon Johns Hopkins had started intensive summer programs where students could devour whole-year math courses, and before long literature classes too, in mere weeks. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth model caught on. Stanley helped start centers at Duke and Northwestern, and there are now programs as well at the University of Denver, the University of Iowa and Vanderbilt University.

"The idea that we should try to make a universal man out of one person isn't appealing to me somehow," Stanley once said, not sharing Terman's interest in the omnibus genius. Instead he and his team emphasized a more specialized vision: to spot children's narrower talent as linguistic or numerical "symbol analyzers" and, by supporting it early and intensively, help spur them on to excel in that field as adults. It is an endeavor, they have pointed out, right in step with the spirit of the information age that was dawning as the SMPY unfolded. What began as a regional talent search has become national, annually testing nearly a quarter-million students. Last year the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth alone recognized about 400 students who scored above 700 on either or both sections - which suggests the net is quite successful in catching the top kids.

In the SMPY's most select group of high scorers - the 1 in 10,000 cohort - almost all have enjoyed some form of academic acceleration, and Stanley's hope of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies so far seems mostly to have panned out. Early adolescent math or verbal trajectories are borne out in about two-thirds of the cases, with the notable exception that high verbal males are as likely to pursue an undergraduate degree in the sciences as in the humanities and arts. Advanced degrees are far more common in this SMPY group than in the general population. Participants also more often receive tenure and take out patents, cited as evidence that the SAT measures "much more than book-learning potential." As SMPY researchers await the analysis of data on the cohort at age 50, it is worth noting their scaled-down accomplishment. They have created what amounts to effective early career-profiling - an instrumental goal rather different from the inspirational visions of their predecessors. Where Hollingworth sought cultural "originations" from her highest I.Q. cohort (not just cultural "conservation"), the new mission is to answer the need for "human-capital specialization" by fine-tuning and facilitating particular expertise earlier and faster.

    It is hard to say what might have become of these already high-scoring middle schoolers had they never sat for the SAT and enjoyed summer courses and been anointed as extra-special. Stanley and his associates have not aspired to conduct a rigorously controlled experiment. They do like to claim, though, that if they had been in charge, the future Nobel laureates Shockley and Alvarez would have made the cut. What they neglect to note is that the two of them didn't need finding. It is interesting, though, to wonder what difference, if any, it might have made to Shockley's career had his alternately domineering and indulgent mother received guidance in rearing her brilliant but obnoxious son. And who knows what might have happened had Shockley received an early (nonmaternal) imprimatur of promise and a chance to mingle with brilliant peers - rather than the insult, which reportedly rankled him all his life, of scoring too low (129) to qualify for the Terman study. Might he have avoided his late-life notoriety? Or is it conceivable that he might not have helped invent the transistor at all?

There is no predicting the fate of the fellows anointed by the Davidson Institute over the past five years, and of course the award itself is just one identity-marking moment for them. But the emergence of this junior MacArthur grant at the turn of the millennium points up the persistent tensions in talent development. On the one hand, it is worth wondering whether the inflated rhetoric of adult approval might prove a burden of sorts for children who are already much lauded. Leta Hollingworth advised long ago against placing highly gifted children "in a position which will be a constant stimulus to live up to the role of child prodigy" and warned against overusing "genius," a term generally understood to imply domain-altering powers no child can possibly yet have. Confidence is a crucial ingredient of success in carving out a distinctive path, but too many early plaudits can undermine risk-taking and drive. Outsize external expectations can also be daunting for precocious learners and performers as they make the maturational leap from the work of mastering rules and skills to the challenge of asserting more self-conscious control of their gifts.

On the other hand, the Davidsons' revival of the reverent terminology is a reminder that precocious accomplishments are wondrous in themselves: the monumental efforts and results children are capable of can be amazing, never mind what those children may (or may not) go on to become. These are awards for hard-earned achievement, not for test-taking ability or abstract potential, Jan Davidson emphasizes as she explains why she feels it is appropriate for the fellows to speak to the press and be saluted by senators and congressmen. By the same token, she doesn't want to see public attention drawn to the other lucky beneficiaries of the Institute's help, the 750 Young Scholars, who are selected merely "for being smart, a God-given gift." The arduous fellowship application (which asks about the labors and mentors involved, and the social significance envisaged) is wisely geared to older adolescents: despite the talk of "prodigies," only 3 of this year's 17 are younger than 16. In Washington, effusions over the fellows' precocious promise and polish are offset by an emphasis on their persistence and their initiative in seeking out guidance - surely a better identity than "genius" for kids with, let's hope, lots of exploratory stumbling ahead of them.

At the evening reception in the Library of Congress, John Zhou and the other dark-suited teenage scientists seemed to be in their element, chatting over the hors d'oeuvres as if they were veterans of public events like this - which the handsome Lucas Moller, who was clearly practiced at answering lay inquiries, gave every sign of being. Moller, a 17-year-old from Moscow, Idaho, has been researching Mars dust ever since fifth grade, when at the suggestion of his scientist father he submitted an entry to a NASA-sponsored school contest and won. It was the beginning of a relationship with a NASA mentor, which has led him on to other related projects and assorted conferences. The basic pattern proved to be common. Entering competitions and finding internships or connections, governmental or academic: from Stephanie Hon (working on Alzheimer's) to Milana Zaurova (studying malignant brain cancer), nearly every science/technology fellow had a similar tale of closely mentored opportunity to tell in the morning discussions that the Davidsons videotaped for clips to quote from when they lecture. It was not quite grist for the "genius denied" paradigm: if schools couldn't offer direct help, no fellow said schools actively stood in the way.

In fact, with all the enabling institutions, it was sometimes hard to tell exactly where and how the young scientists' drives originated. Over lunch, John Zhou's mother - whose husband left China after Tiananmen Square, with her following later - confessed that she had despaired that her bored sixth grader's energy was disappearing into computer games, only to be reassured when she succeeded in redirecting it into Web design, and he became a whirlwind of accomplishment (even setting up a site for a branch of his city's library). "I don't know if I was going to fall through the cracks, like my mother said," John said with a laugh. He was more inclined to credit the example of other purposeful kids as the real catalyst for his many endeavors. As a group, the scientific fellows are definitely not lacking in passion, the galvanic trait everyone invokes these days, including the Davidsons and the fellows themselves. Bob and Jan astutely pressed the kids to also discuss their frustrations - a darker side of intense commitment that too often gets left out, notes Felice Kaufmann, a psychologist who has been following up on a similar group, called the Presidential Scholars. The young scientists obliged. Stephanie Hon, for example, was crushed to think six weeks of research had been in vain, only to discover that a computer glitch accounted for her nonresults - "the best of both worlds," as she put it, "taste the failure but still have the success." No one could say these fellows lack tenacity. What they wouldn't be confused with, though, is that figure of lab lore, the unkempt obsessive pursuing the experiment everybody says is fruitless, or the kid outdoors absorbed for hours watching insects. These are well-connected youths with timely projects - security devices and computer innovations, as well as urgent diseases - who have kept very busy excelling at a well-tailored array of other interests as well, from the saxophone to ballroom dancing and the Boy Scouts.

The musician fellows did not blend in quite so effortlessly that evening, since two of the four of them looked rather young to be mingling at a reception in such an elegant setting: Marc Yu, who plays the cello in addition to the piano, and the 12-year-old Karsten Gimre, also a pianist (as well as a sophomore at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., majoring in math and physics). When it comes to "true" prodigies, preadolescents with spectacular abilities, the Davidson Institute follows the historical pattern of finding them mainly in the realm of music. In publicly touting the very young performers as prodigies, the Institute steps into an ongoing debate. For at least a quarter century now, there has been "a benevolent conspiracy" among influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster "a more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of talent," as the writer Marie Winn put it in a New York Times Magazine article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a "midlife" crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for precocious players to "have a childhood. . .an adolescence," according to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they urge, to "get management" and a packed schedule of practice and performance.

Yet pressure also unavoidably goes with the terrain of musical promise. After all, even if most musicians with phenomenal early talent won't emerge as great mature artists, the stars of the future will surely have been young phenomenons. Marc's mother is well aware of that - and knows that constructive practice at Marc's age requires an adult at his side. So does Marc, who appreciates how much work his idols Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang devoted to honing the technique that no virtuoso can do without. The message for kids that Marc passed on in his session with the Davidsons will no doubt be their most used quotation. "You should play Game Boy less," he said in his slightly lisping cadence, "and you should practice more." Marc's cello teacher understandably worries about all the attention (he has been on "The Tonight Show" and "Oprah"), yet this bubbly boy who can bear down on his music with undaunted intensity seems proof of the pleasure - never mind future fame - this kind of driven focus can bring.

Karsten, who by age 6 had already placed first in the International Young Artists Concert at the Kennedy Center, couldn't help casting more of a shadow with his listlessness in his morning session with the Davidsons. To their opening question about how he got started on the piano, he quietly replied: "Actually, I didn't want to do it. My mother wanted me to have something to do when I was older. And then I liked it." Asked at the end about what lay ahead, he said, "I really don't know what I'm doing," adding with a sigh that he would "just graduate in math and physics." By then it had become clear that Karsten, even before facing any subtle maturational challenges of adolescence, had run into a physical obstacle: elbow tendonitis had forced a hiatus in his playing, he said, and now his wrist hurt. Though he is feeling better, it was the kind of setback that could well leave a phenomenal performer sounding temporarily adrift.

As the Library of Congress reception was breaking up, the literary laureate was standing off to the side, feeling "very weird," she commented. Heidi Kaloustian, the only fellow in literature, hastened to say she had "great respect for science," but the evening had brought home to her just what a different place she was in from the young researchers. A professional path seemed to open out before them, with scientific papers already in the works for some, patent possibilities in view for others, further lab options surely ahead for all. Almost as if in sisterly solidarity, Maia Cabeza, the lone girl musician, came up to ask Heidi eagerly whether her portfolio - which, along with her poetry, contains a striking trio of fictional portraits of female coming-of-age ordeals in other cultures - was going to be published. Trying not to sound too appalled, Heidi answered: "I wouldn't dream of trying. I have so much more to learn." Heidi confided that the fellowship, though hugely welcome, has also been daunting. "I have to top something when I'm not even sure how I did it." It is not that she lacked teachers; she felt indebted to one in particular, and had a fabulous summer with other artistic kids at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. Her spirited mother, an avid reader and nurse, who, instead of whisking her daughters to a round of activities, made sure they had lots of time with books, clearly has inspired confidence in her daughter. Still, to have an imagination like Heidi's is to be aware of how mysterious the future twists and turns may be (and how rarely $50,000 drops down on struggling writers).

Unexpectedly, given that nonverbal brilliance is popularly associated with an aura of weirdness, it is the Davidson Fellows outside the realms of math, science and technology who look quirky by comparison, kids who have embarked on sometimes unwieldy projects that propel them they are not quite sure where. With criteria far less clear-cut in the nonquantitative fields, the institute's judges (who are anonymous) are evidently eager to reward reach and a degree of intellectual nonconformity, and on one occasion extreme youth: a 10-year-old named Alexandra Morris received a fellowship for her literary work. (There is even an "outside the box" category, though so far no winners.) The first year of the fellowships, 2001, 15-year-old Daniel Ohrenstein was awarded for tackling "The Endeavor of Seeing the Essential Nature of Existence," a series of rather woolly philosophical lectures that Ohrenstein, now an engineering major, says he shies from rereading since he has become a convert to "clear thinking" and "vowed never to use the words 'everything' and 'nothing' again." That same year, 16-year-old Rachel Emery says she was rescued by the Davidson award she won for an existential-fantasy novella written in what her mother calls the depths of depression. An eclectic energy has fueled her subsequent course through Simon's Rock, an experimental college designed for high-school-age students, and on to Wellesley, where she continues to work on several novels and to be, as she puts it, "constitutionally incapable of attempting anything on a reasonable scale."

For caution about forecasting and scripting the futures of the highly gifted, there is no better place to look than the past. History has plenty of humbling examples, one of them cited by the psychologist Howard Gruber, who observed that "any fellowship-awards committee comparing young [Thomas] Huxley's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Rattlesnake with young Darwin's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Beagle - both wrote them down in a page or so - would have given first place to Huxley and put Darwin on the waiting list." It was precisely Huxley's impressive "hard-edged analytic objectivism," Gruber speculated, that may have proved a handicap, where Darwin's vaguer, receptive cast of mind was crucial. "When someone asked Albert Einstein, 'What is your key to success?' " Dean Keith Simonton says, his answer was "I'm just curious." Simonton went on: "How do you cultivate that? It's a hard thing to do." He notes that Einstein himself "couldn't be mentored, refused to listen to his teachers, went his own way."

Nobody, of course, expects to handpick the next Einstein. Still, it is worth remembering that the solicitously individualized "scaffolding" for the highly gifted that experts currently recommend, and the pre-professional alacrity that programs like the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and the Davidson Fellowships often reward, are themselves experiments in progress. Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk." Creativity and innovation, he says he is convinced, depend on "exposure to the unusual, to the diverse, to heterogeneity," which inspires a "recognition that there are a lot of different ways of looking at different things." There are also all kinds of ways that this "awareness that there's more than one possible world" can dawn. (The fact that it is built into the immigrant experience is one reason, on top of an ethos of incredibly hard work, that Simonton says he believes kids of recently arrived families so often dominate the ranks of the spectacularly talented.)

No one would recommend throwing more obstacles in highly gifted children's way. But as experts sound the alarm about the brilliant minds that aren't being found or are being frustrated, it is some solace to think that the real geniuses aren't necessarily being denied. They are biding their time and will take us by surprise.

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Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children."